Tag Archives: Murphy

Special Situation

Creating Value Through Corporate Restructuring Course-1 You should add this to the prior post. This syllabus should be read with the book by Gilson: Creating Value Through Corporate Restructuring. Really diligent students will buy and read the corresponding HBS case studies. Perhaps I will post those case studies in a few months.

Analyst Job Posting

I am posting this job opening for several reasons. First, you can apply. Secondly, this ad shows what a typical money management firm would be seeking. You can see that they do not want to train someone from the ground up. Thirdly, note the standard requirements: CFA, Finance Degree, prior work at a finance firm–but I will pay any reader to show a correlation and/or proof that those requirements lead to investment success. A better method to build a great team would be to look at the requirements of the job compared to the skills and characteristics of the candidates. The analyst must search (find), value and monitor investments or potential investments. The candidates would need to be independent thinkers, relentlessly curious, and able to analyze an industry/company. The only way to improve on a market index is to be different from the index. “If you want to have a better performance than the crowd, you must do things differently from the crowd.”—SIR JOHN TEMPLETON

Again, I am amazed with the group-think on Wall Street. Everybody seems to want the same experience, background and training, but then how can one be different from the typical market participant? Wouldn’t an investigative journalist be a potential candidate for digging into company reports rather than a CFA? How about an entrepreneur who has started and run a company–wouldnt that person have different insights? The skepticism, curiosity, relentless digging and tying together disparate facts that an investigator thrives on would be my choice over a typical CFA candidate. Wall Street is MBAed to death.

Therefore, do not be discouraged if you don’t fit INTO THE BOX. Send an example of your work on an industry and/or company. And if you don’t have a body of work, then start building one. GOOD LUCK.

Analyst @ Conatus Capital Management LP (Greenwich, CT)

Full-time, work with senior investment team in sourcing , analyzing and monitoring equity investment opportunities. Perform detailed business and financial due diligence, including analyzing company opportunities, management and secular industry trends. Create detailed financial and operational models for current and potential portfolio companies to conduct intricate financial and valuation analyses.

Bachelor of Business Administration in Finance or related & three years experience as Junior or related role at investment management firm. Also, requires following experience: three years with valuation analysis of companies operating in NA, Europe and Asia; Three years with bottom up operational modeling of companies; analyzing M&A valuation; analyzing debt and equity capital market transaction; analyzing and valuing companies in Global Tech and Alternative Energy (wind & Solar) sections; analyzing and valuing companies in Global Finance section

Description: Conatus Capital Management LP is an employee owned hedge fund sponsor. The firm primarily provides its services to pooled investments vehicles. It invests in public equity markets across the globe. The firm employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis to make its investments. It uses internal research to make its investments. Conatus Capital Management LP was founded in 2007 and is based in Greenwich, Connecticut.

If you had any waivers about Keynesian (establishment/conventional) economics vs. the Austrian perspective then view the video in the link below.

Professor Pedro Schwartz uses facts, theory and irrefutable cause and effect evidence to destroy Krugman’s advice to get out of crisis. The introductions are in Spanish but the debate is in English. I do believe Krugman is ignorant about time in the structure of production, thus he esposes an endless injection of stimulus to increase aggregate demand.

I remember driving through a subdivision in 2010 twnety-five miless outside of Las Vegas wondering who would build four hundred homes for nobody? Tumbleweeds and rattlesnakes…..Had a neutron bomb struck the development? Try stimulating that.

This comes from Luis Martin of TrugmanFactor, a blog located in Spain that translates and publishes Daily Capitalist articles. You can skip the intro in Spanish and get to Krugman’s lecture (0:09:19). But the real stuff starts at 0:35:25 where Professor Pedro Schwartz responds to Krugman’s comments in excellent English. Professor Schwartz is a distinguished and well known Austrian theory economist. And in Luis’s words, “completely destroys Krugman.” In fact Schwartz tweeted later that Krugman refused to shake his hand afterward. Enjoy.

Another Krugman Debate

Robert Murphy, an Austrian Economist, explains the Austrian Business Cycle to Krugman using a Sushi Capital Theory analogy: http://mises.org/daily/4993

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PS: a reader apologized for disagreeing with me. Don’t. I like disagreements or hearing another point of view or discovering that I am just plain wrong. As a fallible human, I hope to always be aware of my fallibility. We are all trying to learn.

Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.–Steven Wright

Study Break

Let’s take a study break and return to the Coors case study this weekend. You have a strong foundation of strategic logic to study the case. You learned from Wal-Mart that management did not expand from Arkansas into California or the Northeast back in 1985, but expanded at its periphery (like an amoeba), where it could readily establish the customer captivity and economies of scale that made it dominant. And it defended its base. What did Coors do?

Let’s be frank. Mises’s writing at times can be difficult, especially his earlier work when he was writing for other economists, rather than the lay public. The amateur fan of Austrian economics who flips through The Theory of Money & Credit might recoil, thinking it is too hard and that anything important from the book would have been distilled by Rothbard in Man, Economy, and State.

If I’ve just described your view, I suggest doing the first week’s reading (the first two chapters from Mises) with my study guide as a companion. You might be pleasantly surprised to discover that Mises’s prose, though a bit formal, is still accessible to the layperson. If — using my study guide for help — you can get through the first week’s readings, then I believe you have what it takes to get through the whole class. It’s true, we will get into material that is more complicated than what Mises lays out in the opening chapters, but then again that’s what you have me for, to explain it for you.

Now if you determine that you are capable of digesting the material, I would urge you to take the plunge and sign up for the course. Yes, Rothbard and others have explained the Austrian theory of the business cycle in other venues. However, by exploring the Misesian framework of money and banking, you will walk away with a much deeper understanding of his theory of economic fluctuations. For example, the typical objection that “we had business cycles before the Fed, so the Austrians are obviously wrong” will seem quite ludicrous after studying Mises’s classic work.